EcocentricPolitics
President Obama will be making his much-anticipated speech on job creation this evening—though, fortunately, he won’t be interfering with the kickoff of the NFL season. But he still has to answer the question—where will those jobs come from?
In the early months of his Presidency, Obama had an answer: the jobs of the future …
EcocentricPolitics
Republicans will be holding their latest Presidential debate in California tonight, and this one will be more newsworthy than most. It marks the debut of Texas Governor Rick Perry, the laconic latecomer who is currently trouncing the rest of the field. I don’t expect the environment or climate change to be a major topic at the …
EcocentricUncategorized
The writer and activist Bill McKibben has a saying: “You can’t negotiate with the planet.” What he means is that climate change will continue to unfold based on the amount of carbon we spew into the atmosphere—along with other physical factors—whether we chose to believe in it or not.
That’s worth remembering as we enter this …
EcocentricEcocentric
First Texas was parched—now it’s burning. Still in the grips of its worst drought since the 1950s, Texas is grappling with violent wildfires that have already destroyed more than 1,000 homes and killed two people. While more than 3.6 million acres of Texas have been scorched since the drought tightened last November, over the …
EcocentricOil
For the past week, hundreds of activists—from celebrities and scientists to ordinary citizens—have come to Washington to protest the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring up to 500,000 barrels of crude a day from western Canada’s oil sands. Scores of those activists have been arrested, but more keep coming every day, …
EcocentricEcocentric
2010 was a pretty serious year for Atlantic hurricanes. The season tied with 1995 and 1887 for the third largest number of named storm, with 19, and tied with 1969 for the second largest number of hurricanes, with 12. One of those hurricanes—Earl—reached Category 4 status, with winds hitting a maximum of 145 mph, stronger than …
EcocentricEcocentric
Hurricane Irene’s cone of uncertainty is getting downright scary. The Category 3 hurricane has already slammed the Bahamas, and the latest forecasts have the storm missing Florida but running into the North Carolina coast on …
EcocentricEcocentric
For several years now, a few academics have been fighting a civil war over the possible effects of climate and global warming on, well, civil war. In 2009 Marshall Burke, an economist at the University of California-Berkeley, co-authored a paper arguing that higher temperatures increased the risk of civil conflict—and that the warming …
EcocentricEcocentric
Come on, Irene — it’s hurricane season. Hurricane Irene, which slashed across Puerto Rico earlier this week and just missed the Dominican Republic, is headed for the southeastern U.S. Irene is expected to strengthen to Category 3 and could become a Category 4 storm, with at least 131-m.p.h. winds as it approaches the southeastern …
EcocentricEcocentric
Personally, I was in the bathroom in TIME’s midtown Manhattan office building, and I didn’t feel a thing—until I got on Twitter. The news moved faster digitally than it did geologically: southwestern Virginia had suffered a 5.8-magnitude earthquake, one apparently strong enough to be felt from Georgia up to Ontario. [Update: USGS …
